Networking architectures have grown increasingly complex in communications environments, particularly storage area network environments. A storage area network includes a number of entities such as hosts, fibre channel (FC) switches, disk arrays, tape devices, etc. Access control is often an important consideration in storage area network implementation. For example, a fibre channel switch may include a zoning table that specifies access rights for various initiators and targets in a fibre channel storage area network. However, current zoning mechanisms for providing access control in storage area networks have significant limitations. With virtualization, stateless computing and cloud infrastructures, changes to the computer and storage infrastructure are more frequent, which increases the complexity of FC zoning tasks and creates a significant challenge in managing fibre channel zoning.